Locus of Control
I was recently talking to a client I’ll call Jill, who is continuously disappointed that her family refuses to recognize all of the hard work she’s done to get on her feet as an adult. She moved out early, started a career, lives alone, and drives a car that she’s paid off. Jill is even studying for a bachelor’s degree while working full-time. She has accomplished all of this without family support. When she visits home, her family looks right past all of her hard work and treats it like luck. If Jill were less polite, she’d probably say that she’s pissed. Humans deserve to be seen and recognized. The reward for persevering through challenges isn’t just the personal joy of getting to the other side, it’s also having our loved ones acknowledge our efforts and see who we are in all of this. Jill has grit, determination, intelligence, self-discipline, and perspective. She can make long-term plans even when she can’t see the future. We assume that any parent would be exceedingly proud of her and want to hear all about it. We imagine that parent saying, “Wow, you have really worked hard! I’m so proud of you! I can’t wait to see where else you go in life!”
But that’s not the family that Jill has. Instead, if Jill mentions that she needed a car repair AND that she had money saved for it, her family considers this “lucky.” If she talks about how she’s completing secondary education in her spare time, they shrug it off, as though this is all just easy for her. Her stable relationship? Oh, that’s also luck. It definitely couldn’t be the hard work that she’s put in to leave unhealthy relationships, the time she’s spent in therapy, and her sheer determination and perseverance. It leaves Jill feeling out of place in her family, as though she needs to shrink herself to try to fit in.
There are so many directions we can go with a discussion about this family. We can talk about socio-economic status and how that affects priorities in a family (lower SES tends to place more value on people and tends to fear achievement because achievement can mean that people leave). We could certainly talk about emotional neglect (some families lack the ability to connect) or immature parents (who possibly struggle to see the other person as an individual or even feel insulted by someone else’s achievement). All of those factors could be relevant here. Instead, we’re going to explore a concept called locus of control. This is about how we view where control comes from in our lives.
Julian Rotter gets the credit for developing the concept of locus of control. It’s a way of talking about how much you feel that you are in control of your life vs. how much it feels like an external force is in control of your life. The “locus” is about location. What location is the control sitting in? Is the location inside of you or outside of you? Internal or external? Internal locus of control allows us to feel like we are responsible for the outcomes in our lives, either good or bad. You might say things like, “I should be able to. . .” because of the belief that humans can largely choose how their lives turn out. External locus of control is the perspective that what you do doesn’t much affect what the outcome is. Everything is luck. You might disparage people who have a better situation in life than you because it isn’t fair. They were starting at Go and you were starting three steps back.
Sally is running the 200-meter dash, but Joseph passes her every time. She’s discouraged and says, “Oh Joseph just wins because he was born with better genetics.” She has an external locus of control about her own athletic abilities. She believes that her athletic performance is outside of her control. However, when Alex loses to Joseph, they say, “Hm, I wonder how Joseph is training. I need to learn some better training techniques so that I can keep up and maybe win.” Alex understands that everyone is in control of their own training, and makes decisions about how they can improve. Alex has an internal locus of control about their running.
A mom talks to me about her daughter’s struggles with writing. She tells me that Makayla says, “I’m just not any good at it. I can’t do this assignment.” The daughter seems to have a belief that some external force, maybe God or The Universe or the all-powerful genetics, made a decision that she would struggle with writing, and that she, the darling daughter, is powerless to do anything about it. As the evening wears on and the time to complete the homework wanes, the stress increases. Makayla has an external locus of control when it comes to her writing abilities.
It’s a terrible bind we get ourselves in when we let go of our agency, our internal control of our lives. We get stuck with consequences but no power to have mitigated them. Why in the world would we let go of the wheel? One answer is that if we don’t have our hands on the wheel of our lives, then we can’t be blamed, or so we hope. “It’s not my fault that I don’t have a university degree. I’m just not that smart. I never had the free time. No one gave me the money. They didn’t select my application.” Makayla can say, “It’s not my fault I didn’t get a good grade on the assignment. I’m just not good at writing.” It saves her the embarrassment of saying, “I chose not to begin the assignment early. I chose not to ask the teacher for help. I chose not to let my parents help me. I chose not to do extra writing practice.”
Lucy and Justin fight about money. She saves hers, and he spends his. I know Lucy and Justin, and they are lovely humans. Justin has the biggest heart. He lends money to his friend in a tight spot. He takes his colleague out to dinner as a thank you. He buys a yummy birthday cake for his friend who isn’t well celebrated by his family. Then, of course, there are roses for Lucy. Lucy also has a beautiful heart, and she has an internal locus of control. This allows her to say no to opportunities to spend money. Justin, for all of his own reasons, has trouble saying no to things, which puts his control of his money outside of himself. He has an external locus of control when it comes to spending money.
Getting back to Jill’s family. . . they have an external locus of control about most things in life which led Jill to feeling like she was living in chaos much of the time. Her parents had their own assorted reasons for living life with their hands only loosely on the wheel, but then to make things worse, disaster struck. Her parents lost their jobs when a major industry left their small town, resulting in the loss of their home as well. There absolutely are things that happen outside of our control, and that can reinforce a tendency towards an external locus of control. On the other hand, if we believe too strongly that everything should be within our control, we make things even harder on ourselves when troubles come knocking on our doors. If we favor an external locus of control, then we may be able to ride out those external events more easily. This internal/external thing is not all or nothing. You can be a bit of this and a lot of that. Having some amount of balance between internal and external locus of control can help us adapt to life as it is.
Unfortunately for Jill, since her family has a strong external locus of control, they have trouble really seeing Jill. It’s difficult for them to understand why she would choose to work so hard, and truly challenging for them to comprehend that it isn’t just luck for her. Since they have taken their hands off the wheel of their lives, it truly would be luck if they had all of the accomplishments that Jill has.
Locus of control could be confused with boundaries, but these are different concepts. Boundaries is about noticing what is you and what is not you. It’s about where is your bubble and what do you allow in your bubble. Justin gives us a good example because these two concepts do overlap for him. If his friend says, “Hey Buddy, can you lend me $500?” Justin has trouble feeling like there’s a boundary between him and his friend. His friend’s problem is his problem. That’s a lack of boundaries. External issues driving his spending habits, that’s an external locus of control. For Justin, both boundaries and external locus of control are at play. The examples of Sally and Makayla don’t include obvious boundary issues. The issue for each of them is an external locus of control. Yes, we can also add that they might need to learn to push themselves harder and take responsibility and so on, but doing those things only makes sense if the results in their lives are related to their own efforts. If things just happen to them by external forces, then why work harder?
You might be reading this and thinking, “Oh! I have an external locus of control about some things. Um. . . what now?” Or perhaps you have a child like Makayla and wonder how to support her? Lots of parents simply tell their children, “Just work harder. Keep going.” They might be noticing that they aren’t getting anywhere with that. Here are some ideas to get you going.
Notice the reasons you feel like an external locus of control makes sense to you. What are the beliefs that keep the control outside of you? Some of those are probably real and some might not be accurate. Take a look at them.
If you suspect you might also need to learn about boundaries, it might help to take some time to learn what they are and how a lack of boundaries might be affecting you. Clearer boundaries can help us to feel a strong sense of an internal locus of control.
Most of us have more internal locus of control in some areas of our lives than others. Start by recognizing which areas of your life you do feel like you have some control over.
Take a week or two to sit down at the end of each day. Notice where you made an active choice and notice how that’s playing out. Do you have a little more control than you thought? Is it only in a limited number of areas in your life?
Have reasonable expectations. It can be really hard to know how much control over your life is reasonable to expect and comparing yourself to others probably won’t help things be any clearer, so be prepared to be flexible. Sometimes we will put in lots of effort and things still won’t work out. It’s not a one-to-one relationship. Did you put in extra effort in five places and three of them worked out? That’s great!
Parents, help your children notice the ways that their effort pays off. Hold back on praising kids for doing well. Instead, have lots more conversations about the effort that they’ve put in to doing the work. What was it like to do an extra page of practice work? What are they focused on as they take an extra 30 minutes to review? What is their plan to improve? What support do they need? Do they want you to quiz them or to be an audience? What kind of feedback would they like?
Our culture has a high value on a strong internal locus of control which leads to greater stress and blame. A healthy goal isn’t to have a complete internal locus of control. A healthy goal is greater awareness and an ability to make small changes where possible. I believe in you!